Damascus
by Bialy
Summary: At eight minutes past seven, on an evening in January, years after the Kira case was shut and bolted, Matsuda steps out of his apartment, and turns left.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, I'm making no money off this. Quote is an extract from The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Yes, it's Wilde.

Note: This is a short short thing that's going to be acting as a preface to something I might write. Otherwise, it'll stand alone. I penned it a week or so ago when my NaNoWriMo was giving me hell, read it over today and decided I quite liked it, so would post it as an incentive to myself to actually write this damn story. It will essentially be Matsuda between 7pm and midnight on January 28th, 2020. Mostly rambling narrative, done semi-stream of consciousness style. And it'll be rockin'. For me to write, if not you to read :D Also - yes, I know I need to stfu with the silly Biblical titles. But I DON'T WANNA.

Anyway, guys. Hope it's going good with you. Enjoy.

x

**Damascus**

**-**

_Some love too little, some too long  
Some sell, and others buy  
Some do the deed with many tears  
And some without a sigh  
For each man kills the thing he loves  
Yet each man does not die_

-

It is seven o'clock. It is the twenty-eighth of January, 2020, and time keeps passing by. Sometimes when it is too late in the evening to do anything new and too early to wind down for the night, things happen in the world when nobody is watching.

At five minutes past seven Matsuda leaves his apartment. He is wearing slacks, a plain white shirt, and a coat. He hasn't though to bring a jacket because he thinks the coat will be warm enough. It doesn't occur to him that if it is too heavy he will have to take it off, or if he goes inside it will be unseemly, and then a wind through the door could chill him through the thin sheen of the shirt. It doesn't occur to him that once he take his coat off he is sure to forget it, and then, if it rains, the shirt will stick to him, cling to him, bind his arms to his chest and make him sneeze for days to come.

None of this occurs to Matsuda because it is January, and ten years ago today, Light Yagami died.

It is cold outside and Matsuda wonders if he turned the iron off. He doesn't iron things often, but today, he found himself aimless, restless, and he did everything – he ironed, he cooked something that turned out to be inedible. He went to the gym and realised that he was pushing forty now and had never been good at this kind of thing anyway. He called Ide but they've long since parted ways, and while Ide still likes him and still sees him, on this day every year they all have their own problems to deal with. To begin with, they helped Matsuda – they knew he was hurting, knew there was something eating at him inside that he couldn't get to, couldn't dig out. Some kind of poison chewing at him, perhaps, some demon festering in his innards.

After five years they decided that it was best to pursue a policy of tough love, and every year now, they leave him to it, to struggle through, to heal himself. No one should be mourning this long, no one should feel guilt for ten years.

Matsuda does. Matsuda does for reasons he can't explain, reasons he's only ever half admitted to, in a dull, hazy period between sleep and waking when everything seems clear and simple and beautiful and right. And then consciousness wraps thin tendrils around his mind, pulling it into a world where nothing is simple and nothing is defined, and everything is tainted and marred and broken. He thinks he could have put it back together if he'd just be left for five minutes to do it – only, he's been left for more than five minutes, he's been left for ten years. Sometimes it feels like he's been on his feet every minute, cramming sleep between new cases and obsessive, extensive hobbies, and then he sits down, and looks back, and realises that for the last ten years he has barely been alive.

He has barely done anything.

He has done nothing.

Matsuda is decomposing, in some dark recess of his mind, where the sunlight never reached even when he stood out in it full force, all those years ago when he was happy and in love and no one was dying or dead. Now the sunlight doesn't even reach his face, reach his eyes, so the corner of his mind where nothing ever grew is rotting away, falling apart, into pieces that will shatter when they hit the ground and burst, like the shadow of a bubble, when they touch against silk or satin.

Breaking apart, he is. Somewhere. In him breaking – things fall apart and oftentimes when it is dark and no one is awake in the city except him – in that moment after midnight when time shifts and stops and even the waking are sleeping and the sleeping are dead, he is alive in that moment only. Thinking and dreaming and remembering and oh God what has happened to him. What has he been doing with his life, and when did he turn forty? When did he get here, how did he get here, where the hell is everyone and why, why, why can't he get his head around anything at all anymore?

So at five past seven Matsuda leaves his apartment in slacks and a shirt and a coat, because he can't bear to be inside anymore, with his thoughts chasing each other around the room, and all the lights are off because he can't afford the electricity. He thinks that he did turn the iron off. When he leaves his apartment, he turns right to go to work, and right to go out, and right to go for food. He doesn't remember what lies to the left, and tonight, because he doesn't want to go anywhere he remembers, he goes that way.

In the morning he probably won't remember what was down that way and will keep wondering. He will probably be wondering what lies down the road when you turn left from his apartment for the rest of his life, and he will probably die with the question on his lips.

At eight minutes past seven, he turns left.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Don't own Death Note. Quote's Wilde's BoRG again.

Note: So I'm finished with the NaNoWriMo :D and now I'm getting back to fanfic with a story none of you care about. It's easy, though, because it's Matsuda and it's angst and it's rambling pointless introspection because I like pretty sounding words. And I haven't written Matsuda properly in AGES so now we have older!Matsu, who apparently is harder to conceptualise. I found that too, but it's such a fun idea I have to give it a try.

x

**Damascus**

-

_The Govenor was strong upon  
The Regulations Act:  
The Doctor said that death was but  
A scientific fact:  
And twice a day the Chaplain called  
And left a little tract._

_-_

The road to the left is straight and brightly lit, until it comes to an abrupt halt and veers off to the right, up a steep hill, and into the encroaching darkness. Gloom waits at the top of the slope, slouching along, muttering to itself in whispers of wind and the rustling of rubbish on a street that has yet to be cleaned.

Matsuda turns up the hill without thinking, following it simply because it is the way the road goes, and this is the road he's following tonight. He only notices he's ascending when he's about half way up, and his calves start to ache. He stops dead and looks around, but the descent makes him remember careening down a hill as a kid, and losing his balance, and falling head first into an old woman who his father insisted upon driving to hospital for a check up. So Matsuda doesn't go back down. He turns, and makes his way to the top.

Then, the road levels out, and stretches onwards into the distance, where he can see a metal chain fence silhouetted against the sky and at twenty two minutes past seven, he wonders why he never knew that this road led to Daikoku Wharf.

He keeps walking, and before long, a clock is chiming eight somewhere in the distance. He doesn't really hear it because his mind is on other things: the strands of grey appearing in his hair, the wrinkles around his eyes that were never there before and the way everyone else he's ever known has moved on with their careers by this point, but he's still just the same old detective he was sixteen years ago, when his boss asked him if he wanted to come round for dinner, and he met Light Yagami for the first time.

Light was fifteen when Matsuda met him. He had just had a mock exam at his school, and was telling his mother about the questions that had been asked when Matsuda sat down at the table. The boy had turned stunning, hazel eyes on him, blinking once, before bowing his head and greeting the newcomer. They had been served by the Chief's wife, and Sayu had bounded down the stairs, only thirteen, catching sight of him and inquiring of her father who he was. Once she'd been told "a cop", she was poking at his leg, asking him if he had a gun, and what he did the other day and if he'd caught any criminals today and did he work with her dad and –

And then Light had smiled at her across the table, as their parents looked on in mounting irritation and embarrassment, and Matsuda began to feel more awkward. And in a few words, he diffused all the tension from the situation, asking Sayu to come sit by him and tell him about school.

That evening, Matsuda had decided that if angels existed and walked on earth, they would probably have looked like Light Yagami.

It was an idea he kept with him, drifting in his dream sometimes when the day had been long and filled with more grit and grime than usual, for a long, long time, even as Light's body splayed out before him in a dark warehouse, blood blossoming from his chest. There was a bullet wound in his hand, too, Matsuda remembers, from where he had shot him to save Near's life. Matsuda remembers because in the back of his head, even as the trigger clicked the final time and his bullet pounded into the concrete, he thought that with his arms splayed out like that, and his fingers so bloody, Light looked just like Christ crucified.

Matsuda doesn't know much about God but he's heard some of the stories, and he knows that Christ was sacrificed for the sins of others. He can kind of see that about Light, too – Light, who was trying to do something good, Light, who put his own soul in jeopardy to purge the world of evil - Light, who died in darkness and never should have been left like that, screaming and alone, surrounded by enemies, on a cold day in January in a world that didn't even know what he'd done for them.

He feels more guilty for that than anything else. Shooting Light, that was one thing, and it played on his mind for years – and it still does, if he's brutally honest, baring his soul to judgment – but leaving him there, not answering him when he called out for someone, anyone to help him...

Christ on the cross, he thinks, with two thieves, a news reporter and a lawyer gone down in flames with him, and Misa left lonely and living.

For the time being, he adds in his head, a silent tribute to the dead girl they buried nine years ago, in a public funeral with out of proportion mourning and a complete lack of understanding of what had happened. And Matsuda had been there, standing among women in makeup and men in suits, knowing all the while that this was his fault, too.

All this sadness and all this death – it was his fault.

His stomach growls. Matsuda realises that the last time he ate had been a sandwich on the go yesterday lunchtime, and he isn't hungry, but he knows that he has to eat. It's something Ide always told him – for a few years, anyway – that just because he had no appetite, didn't mean his body didn't still need fuelling. Matsuda didn't feel like it needed fuelling, though, because he never _did_ anything, just sat at home and let the months wash over him.

It's almost half past eight and he's too close to the wharf, so he veers off to the left. There's a pizza place so he orders a slice of the cheapest thing on the menu, and he stands, looking out over the water, chewing cheese and flat bread, flour sticking to his lips.

A cold breeze pulls through and tears the napkin away, tossing it over the fence. The warehouse is a little way away.

If he turns that way, walks towards it, pushes open the door into the hollow, ghostly interior –

He'd find demons waiting for him.

But if he faced them, a voice says, if you go there right now, tonight, before another minute passes, and look all of the last ten years in the face, then you'll be okay. You'll be fixed, at last, and you can finally _live_ again.

But cowardice is a hard habit to break, and Matsuda turns another way, away from Yellow Box, and into the town.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or Matsuda etc etc etc. Quote is Wilde BoRG as will be in ever chapter.

Note: OH YES, I GOT AN INTERVIEW AT OXFORD. Going up next Wednesday for a few days, interview for the law course. Heck yes. As for this chapter, well - you may have noticed a certain theme of Matsuda arriving at a place and then going somewhere else. THIS WILL CONTINUE. I know where I want this to end up but have no idea how it'll get there. Like Matsuda, I'm just wandering around this story hoping to make some sense of it all. I see Matsuda as so messed up after the Kira case, as IC would have shown you, that it would take a lot of unravelling. in this storyline, he's been doing that for ten years, and this is where it takes him.

x

**Damascus**

-

_The loftiest plae is that seat of grace  
For which all worldlings try:  
But who would stand in hempen band  
Upon a scaffold high,  
And through a murderer's collar take  
His last look at the sky?_

-

Matsuda lingers too long at a cross roads, and he's thinking about whether or not he should turn back.

Of course, he shouldn't. Because Matsuda, he's never been good at this kind of thing – this 'coping' thing – and it's never even mattered how good his 'support network' is, because that's now how he works. No, Matsuda doesn't need a network, he needs one person, and that's it. Just one person he can latch onto, one person he can look at and say, 'Yes, this is how it's meant to be. This is right. This is good.'

Matsuda found that in the Chief, but then in a blast of stone and out of proportion violence, teenage rebellion gone horribly wrong, the Chief turned to ash in front of him. No – no, he'd been the Deputy Director then, Matsuda reminds himself. Deputy Director Yagami, brought to his knees by a boy in blond and black when all he could see everywhere around him was death – death, floating in the air above people's heads, death, in the charred bodies of mafia members collapsed from Kira's icy grip, sneaking out of the dark and into their hearts...

So after the Chief there'd been Light. Matsuda knows that he'd attached himself to Light just as strongly – more strongly, even - than he ever had to the Chief, and that for that foundation to be pulled out from under him a second time... And not just even pulled out, but shattered, crashed into the ground, thrown in his face with a laugh and a sneer and the echoing sound of a bullet in an empty room, and a scream.

He decides not to go back to the warehouse at five to nine, and walks into the town.

The lights are all on, because it's the time of year when it's dark out now, and people need the streets to be brightly lit to keep them safe. There's all kinds of things out there – 'in the world' – pickpockets, rapists, even murderers scattering the sidewalks, bowed into shadows with guns or knives heavy in their pockets and filling up the space left by a soul. Hollow, empty, dead people, with life that's not worth anything filling their veins, life that's little more than mud, seeping through them, oozing out onto the rest of the world, staining _everything_, because they can't just be vile and evil and _wrong_ on their own, it has to be forced on everyone else, thrust in their faces, down their throats, choking them on smog and smoke –

Matsuda stops abruptly, because he's almost walked into this little old lady holding her shopping bag close to her chest. She looks up at him, terrified, and clutches her bag even closer, reeling backwards. He realises he looks unkempt and smells of grease, and wonders what she's thinking. Then he notices just how tightly she's gripping the cloth of the bag, a loaf of bread poking out of the top, and he thinks he knows.

She reminds him of the woman his dad took to hospital. It makes him shiver. He apologises a few times, tells her he's a police officer without really knowing why, and this seems to unnerve her even more. He backs away, letting her know she can run away know, and he's still apologising. He tries to shut himself up. It doesn't work.

God _damn_ you, Touta Matsuda. You're useless.

Light was never useless, to give credit where credit was due. As L, he was efficient, even if Near said otherwise. As Kira, he was perfect – flawless. It was only Mikami that let him down, only Mikami, with his mistake, that let the facade slip and let Light be seen for what he was.

What was Light?

Evil. No. No, Light Yagami couldn't have been evil. Maybe he did an evil thing, but...did he? Are we worse off now, Matsuda thinks, now that all those people are dead? All those awful people, glutted on their own iniquity...that's a bad thing, getting rid of them? Matsuda, he doesn't think so. Or maybe he does, in a part of him, the front part of him, that it's okay to show and that everyone expects and likes to see. But in the back of his mind...

In the back of his mind, Matsuda knows that he would never have done what Light had done because he is too much of a coward even to write a name in a notebook. Light was braver than them all and stronger than anyone Matsuda's ever known, because Heaven knows what's going to happen to his soul now. But the world...

The world is better because of him.

That, Matsuda thinks, is the crux of it. That's the reason he hasn't been able to shake himself up for ten years, that's the reason Ide and Mogi and even Aizawa have stopped talking to him, it's the reason he can't get himself properly from one bill payment to the next. Because he thought a long time ago, and he still thinks today, that Light Yagami was a good man.

And that's a sin, really. It's the worst sin there is, worse than whatever Kira was to blame for, worse than turning a blind eye to evil deeds – seeing something that you know is wrong, that you've been taught is disturbing and horrific and just _looking _at it, and thinking –

I wish I could be that man.

There wouldn't need to be so many Lights, Matsuda thinks bitterly, if Light were still alive. He'd be making sure of it – he'd be watching over each and every person in the world, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, saving the good and punishing the bad, making things safe and good and right.

Light's dead though. Dead and buried and probably long since rotted away, his name tidied into a corner with a few old yearbooks and some perfectly folded shirts, still smelling oh-so-vaguely of Misa's perfume.

Matsuda can't stand the town anymore. It's too claustrophobic, with the people and the _lights_, and the smell of food and beer up from all the buildings lining the road. For a moment, Matsuda's tempted, because it would be so damn easy to just slip inside the place next to him, disappear behind the blue painted door, order a few drinks and forget that it's January at all. He's about to, he's turning, one foot placed in front of the other and the door is creaking, sliding open, a bell at the top jingles and a couple of people inside are looking up to see who's coming in.

Then in the distance there's a tower, that's been there all night and he's been walking towards it for nearly an hour now, but somehow, he only just managed to notice it now.

Once upon a time, a beautiful young woman threw herself off the top of that tower, and she crumpled into the ground, her bones crashing and crunching together into a blend of sharp white shards and slick red blood. Matsuda remembers the photographs of her, spread-eagled on the ground, her neck at an angle that made his stomach turn over, her eyes open and unseeing, her blonde hair matted with sweat and rain and blood.

Yeah, Matsuda thinks bitterly, he always did have a good memory for the gory stuff, and the door to the bar swings shut, and his feet are taking him to the water tower from which Misa Amane took her last look at the city, nine years ago.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or Matsuda. Just a big ol' bucket of angst cookies.

Note: I'm sorry for the update spam, anyone with me on alert. Idk it's like half seven in the morning and I can't sleep. So DEATH NOTE YAY. Whatever. Okay so yeah Damascus, I do love this. Angsting Matsuda is where I began in this fandom. We seem to be reaching a close now, I think maybe one or two, perhaps three tops, chapters left to go. More of a retrospective look at this one than in the others, but hey, got to keep trying stuff out. Hope you enjoy :3

x

**Damascus**

-

_He did not wear his scarlet coat,  
For blood and wine are red,  
And blood and wine were on his hands  
When they found him with the dead,  
The poor dead woman whom he loved,  
And murdered in her bed._

_-_

The water tower stretches up, up into the encroaching dark, and maybe it's just Matsuda's imagination that makes it seem sinister, but he doesn't think so. Grass and flowers are growing on the patch of earth where Matsuda thinks that, if there's any justice or rightness in the world, nothing should ever grow.

But he's long since stopped believing, or hoping, for any justice. He's long since stopped trusting himself to recognise it, too, because the last time he thought something was good and right and just –

Misa shouldn't have died. He doesn't care about what Aizawa says, about her perhaps being worse than Light, because she killed without reason or concern – he doesn't care at all. All he cares about, really, is that he _liked_ Misa. He liked her. Maybe even –

No, those are dangerous thoughts. They were dangerous ten years ago and they're dangerous now, even when they're all dead and buried and Matsuda is the only one left alive who cares enough to remember.

He was the one who told Misa that Light was dead.

The one who told her...no. The one who _let her know_ is better, because he never really told her. She just...worked it out. Because of a kiss that should never have happened, and the slow, sad fact that if Light had been alive Matsuda would never have _let_ it happen.

Misa threw herself from the top of the water tower on Valentine's Day, 2011. She did not tumble or struggle, but made a simple, graceful arc, her body loose and folded like a toy's – like a doll being dropped from a cabinet by a little girl curious to see if its eyes will smash when it hits the pavement.

And it does smash, this little porcelain doll that was the only woman Matsuda ever –

No, it's still too dangerous. Too awful, too painful to even think.

She smashed into pieces, bound together by skin but inside – broken. Shattered. Bones in different places, all wrong, wrong wrong, and _blood_ and such ugly bruises. Her body was crumpled and defeated and chewed up and spat out, and really, it was just like everything she'd been feeling, everything she'd been in her heart, had suddenly come out and manifested itself. Like she hadn't fallen from anything at all, but she'd simply been walking along, quite calmly, when all of her desperation and her pain inside just overflowed and she fell to the ground – a little broken doll.

It rained. Matsuda remembers that. And he remembers the call, and he remembers rushing out, and almost crashing because he'd had too much to drink (not that there was a reason, other than the usual ones, not that he'd been busy or spending the night with anyone. Just another February 14th spent alone in his apartment), and then arriving –

He remembers standing, without his coat, in the pouring rain, looking at Misa Amane shattered on the stone in front of him.

After that, he had two bodies to dream about. Two people he'd –

It isn't like this for the others. All they have to deal with – all they've ever had to deal with – is the fact that they trusted a man who turned out to be a bad guy. Matsuda, oh, now Matsuda's got so much more to worry about. He's got to worry about the fact that he thought Kira was _right_, that he _shot_ one of the people he looked up to the most, that he caused Misa to kill herself...

Matsuda must live with the fact that everything he has done has brought pain and torment and death.

For Matsuda, that's a wall. For Matsuda, who could never fight back in school because he didn't want to hurt someone, for Matsuda, who gets upset when he sees a man slap a woman on television, for Matsuda, the fact that _he_ was the one who – who – who made this _happen_...

For Matsuda, there is a reason he climbed that water tower a month later.

But he was too afraid to take the final step. Too afraid – afraid of falling, afraid of hitting the ground, afraid of the sickening swoops of air and the sound of his own bones breaking. So he'd climbed back down the tower, and gone back to his life.

He stops, with one foot on the first run of the ladder leading up.

He steps back.

He's kidding himself to think he's grown a backbone in the last nine years. He wouldn't be able to step off now anymore than he had been able to all that time ago.

Misa...it had been simpler for Misa. She had been so honest about everything that it didn't _need_ to be complicated. She loved Light. Light died. She died too. That was all there was to it.

Aizawa had said once that he couldn't understand Misa for doing what she did. Ide had asked him what if all his family was killed, and Aizawa had shrugged, and said, "It would be the worst thing in the world. But if I were to die the only thing that would happen was that they would not be mourned enough."

Aizawa thought Misa should have stayed alive. Should have kept fighting. Should have rebuilt her life...

But Matsuda understands. Matsuda understands how one person can become that important to you, how you notice everything they do, how their smile or their presence becomes the defining feature of each day...and when that's gone, when it suddenly _leaves_, how horrifyingly bleak and empty the world is. How suddenly you realises how little there is to live for.

Matsuda can understand why Misa killed herself. And he can understand what she saw in Light, too.

He kind of wishes she hadn't, though, even if it is for a stupid, selfish reason. Even if it is because –

No.

It starts to rain.

Matsuda reaches to pull his coat more tightly around him, but he doesn't have it. He remembers vaguely taking it off in the town, remembers sitting down for a moment, remembers –

He doesn't remember picking it up.

And now, the rain is starting to soak through his shirt. He starts to shiver a little, but he doesn't move. He's _tired_. And he doesn't want to _do_ this anymore. He just – he just –

There's nothing. Really, and truly, and _honestly_, there's nothing, and there's been nothing ever since Misa cast herself from the tower, the princess going in the wrong direction. All of the others, all of the ones who lost so, so much, they've been able to find something to hold onto, or build up something new. But Matsuda...

He's been hanging on by a thread and he doesn't even know how. For ten years, he's been in a funk he can't shake off, head clouded with thoughts that won't fade. Sure he's been bright, and sure, for a while, it looked like he was getting better, but...it never happened. That moment when everything just went away, it never came.

And Matsuda was stuck where he was back in Yellow Box. Empty, ashamed, angry, lost...and tired. So very, very tired.

He tilts his head up against the rain and there's warm droplets on his face, too, salty and hot and sad. He looks up at the ledge Misa stood on, lets his eyes follow the path her body would have taken, lets them land on the spot she would have fallen to...

And he falls, then, falls to his knees next to that spot. All the tiredness of ten years starts pouring out of him, all the pent up sorrow, and he starts to cry. Though he's cried before it's been nothing like this, these wild, hacking sobs, shaking shoulders, leaning forwards with his hands dug into the soaking earth, mud oozing around his finger tips.

When Light died, he'd lost the man he'd admired more than anyone else alive, after the Chief died.

When Misa died, he'd lost the only woman he'd ever loved, even if he'd never had a chance with her.

And now...

Now, he's just tired, and he's just empty, and he's soaked to the skin and he's covered in mud –

- and he wants this to be _over_.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Don't own anything you recognise. Poem's still Ballad of Reading Gaol.

x

**Damascus**

-

_And he of the swollen purple throat,  
And the stark and staring eyes,  
Waits for the holy hands that took  
The Thief to Paradise;  
And a broken and a contrite heart  
The Lord will not despise._

-

It rains for a very long time.

If Matsuda were to close his eyes, and put aside, just for a moment, everything he knew about time and logic and the universe, he could almost believe that it rained for ten years.

Once upon a time, he had been able to do that. Once upon a time he'd been _hope_ in a group of men faced with a task impossible to complete. Far, far away, he'd been happy.

When it stops raining, Matsuda's trousers are ruined. Earth has turned to mud, thick and heavy, clinging to the thin material, seeping through and trickling down his legs as he forces himself to rise to his feet.

Overhead, if he looks as high as he can look, the sky is dark. He is standing on the edge of the town and straight ahead an engulfing blackness is clinging to grass and trees, and to the stone path leading away from the water tower. Behind him, light rises from the town, seeping into the air and staining the night.

Matsuda takes a few steps back towards the town. He stops. He turns. He takes a few steps towards the murky greenery. His shoes make squelching noises as he pulls them out of the mud, and it doesn't occur to him to get back on the path. It never has.

It's ten minutes to midnight, but Matsuda doesn't know this. If he did, perhaps he could hope – perhaps he _would_ hope, with his final, dying spark of youthful illusion –that the midnight marking the end of the tenth year would herald in some new beginning, bring with it some epiphany or insight, let him cast of the muddy manacles that have kept him snared.

Empty and emotionless, Matsuda does not have the energy to move. In his mind, a dozen thoughts are playing out against each other, and none of them register. He's thinking about Sayu, who never really woke up, and about Sachiko, who can never get to sleep. Somewhere else in his head he's thinking about Light and Misa and Mikami and Mello and everyone else, and Ukita, and the Chief. And Takada. And Watari. And Aiber and Wedy. And Naomi Misora and Raye Penber.

And L...

The Kira case took four years, and now his brain _is_ working. Now, his brain is adding it up – how old L might have lived to be, how many more years Takada could have been a broadcaster, how many kids Misora and Penber could have had.

And he's counting up all the years they've had out of it now – him, and Ide, and Aizawa, and Mogi, even the SPK members and Near, all the people who would have lost if Light had won. That's eight, so if eight of them had ten more years out of it, that's eighty years of life that would have been gone.

He wonders if any of Kira's victims had wives. Or husbands. He wonders if crime makes you love someone less. He thinks of Aizawa's wife, and he thinks of Misa, and he thinks it probably doesn't.

The rain is starting to fall again. Matsuda starts walking.

His feet carry him onto the stone pavement. They carry him away from the town, each footfall heavy against hardness. His feet are hurting and the mud-soaked trousers are uncomfortable.

And Matsuda remembers something.

He remembers being a little boy, something a lot of people aren't sure he grew out of. He remembers his father, sitting frowning at him, and asking him if Matsuda thought it was wrong to hit his father. Matsuda had frowned, and he'd said yes. His father had hit him, a solid punch to the shoulder. He'd asked if it hurt. Then he'd asked if now it was right for Matsuda to hit him.

Matsuda had said no. His father had nodded, satisfied, and Matsuda hadn't understood.

With the town fading, more and more lights flickering off, and the silence of midnight curling around him, he thinks that now, he does.

Back by the town, the glow above the town is neither light nor shadow, and in a moment of poetry, Matsuda thinks that that's where he's been these past years. Ahead in the trees, the darkness is nearly entirely complete, and the path trickles off into nothingness. Matsuda's never been in those trees and he doesn't know what's there.

He realises it doesn't matter.

It is one of those moments that come when no one was looking or listening, sliding between the rain and a shattered myriad of broken dreams. The sky is still dark, and the pavement is slick and wet, but quietly something is shifting, changing, bringing with it the whisper of something that has never come before.

Matsuda reaches the trees. He keeps walking. And he knows what his father was trying to teach him.

To cause someone pain is a terrible thing, no matter what the circumstances are. To be the orchestrator of suffering, the ender of life, and to believe that it is righteousness...Matsuda realises, in a blinding instant born of nothing but rain and fading streetlamps, that it's sick. That criminals are sick and that killers are sick and that Light –

That Light was sick.

His stomach turns over, squirms, but he doesn't let himself run from it. One foot in front of the other. Still walking. Face this.

Misa was sick.

His heart implodes, somewhere inside him, more pain than any Death Note can cause. He keeps walking.

Kira was...no, Kira, in his essence, is still about, so Kira _is..._

Wrong.

And the woods are very dark and very deep and the night is very heavy, and there is no one around when Matusda starts laughing and crying all at once, deep, shaking sobs and howls of realisation and joy and desperation and understanding.

It's all he can do to keep walking, but he does, staggering a little, almost double over, tears streaming down his face but his mouth open wide in a gasping smile. And he looks up, and there are _stars_ out, and you never see stars near the town, and he hasn't seen them in years. There are _stars_, doing nothing but sitting there and shining, doing nothing but being what they are.

And it's stupid.

It's completely stupid.

It's stupid because when he gets in, soaked to the skin, caked in mud and grinning like a madman, hot and cold and _excited_, there's a pile of his unopened mail and there are two letters from Aizawa, both asking to talk and how he is. And his unchecked phone messages are from Ide, trying to make plans for the 28th, and Mogi, asking if he wants to go out drinking, and as far back as December – God, has it been that long since he checked? – there's a computerised voice: _A very happy birthday to Mr Matsuda, from N_.

And he was never alone and they had never given up on him and he'd been so _stupid_ because he hadn't even bothered to see.

He calls Ide. He's making no sense, he's hyperactive, and he's gabbling, asking how he is and every few sentences exclaiming "Kira was wrong! Kira was evil! Light was wrong, can you believe it?"

And Ide had been asleep and was patiently trying to tell him that while it was wonderful that he had finally come to this conclusion, and that they had all been very worried about him, it was nearly one o'clock in the God damn morning so could he pleased have his moment in the morning, thank you.

But in the end Ide winds up at Matsuda's playing Go Fish until the sun starts to brighten the sky.

And in the end it wasn't a midnight epiphany but the slow, seeping in of reason at a time that meant nothing at all to anyone, early in the morning of the twenty-ninth of January, when Matsuda really understood.

In the end it hadn't been some saviour, some friend pulling him out of it – it had to have been him, Matsuda, finally _waking up_ and _realising_ and _thinking_.

And in the end...

In the end, it hadn't been the end after all.

And it wouldn't be for a good time yet, because Matsuda, as he lost his last few coins of change to Ide over a six-thirty a.m. card game, and ruined his couch with the mud from his trousers, had started to wake up.

Mogi told him, over coffee a few days later, with grey appearing in his hair, that Matsuda had found God. And Matsuda had frowned and said that he didn't think so, not that God wasn't a good idea or anything, but – and then Mogi interrupted him, and he said,

"I don't mean the Biblical God. Not the deity in that sense. I just mean God. Spirit. Feeling. Hope. Rebirth. Like Saul."

Matsuda didn't know what Mogi meant by Saul, and Mogi guessed, so he told him.

"Saul who found God on the road to Damascus. And it made him change his life."

"You think I'm like that now? Like Salle?"

"Saul."

"Yeah, him."

"I think –" Mogi had paused and set down his coffee cup and frowned. "I think that there's a lot of ways for people to change their lives."

Matsuda didn't ask him what he meant.

Instead, he paid his cheque, said goodbye to Mogi, and started to find out for himself.

-

_Ah! happy they whose hearts can break  
And peace of pardon win!  
How else may man make straight his plan  
And cleanse his soul from Sin?  
How else but through a broken heart  
May Lord Christ enter in?_

_-_

Note: Well I owe you an apology. I feel like I had a semi good thing going with this story and then this last chapter seems like it's going to be a horrible let down for you guys. Unfortunately it's what I had planned all along and the only bit I was set on. After all, you write for yourself, right? So sorry to anyone who's disappointed by this ending. But I'm happy with it.

A massive thank you to every single reviewer, too, and an even bigger thanks to those of you who actually reviewed MORE than once. Sonar, thebookhobbit, Xbakiyalo, Star Jinin and Volital, you know that means you.

This story was never meant to be anything special. It was meant to be me purging all my NaNo angst by having fun with words again and getting back to grips with writing Matsuda - which is, really, the only reason I took up writing again back in July. For me this story was important. And I'm glad to have finished it. Thank you again to everyone who reviewed/favourited/read it. I hope you all enjoy whatever way you choose to spend your New Year's, and that next year is fantastic for each and every one of you.


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